1. From the BBC:
"Distant starlight gets stretched by the expansion of the Universe and shifts into the infrared region of the spectrum. We call it redshift," explains Richard Ellis, a University College London astronomer who's impatient to explore the end of the dark ages.
"The limiting factor we have with Hubble, for example... It's also not a particularly large telescope. It's been a pioneering facility, for sure. Amazing pictures. But the diameter of its mirror is only 2.4m, and the power of a telescope scales with the square of the diameter of the mirror. And that's where JWST comes in.
Why doesn't he just say "the power of a telescope scales with its surface area"? That's easy to understand and makes sense. He's trying to sound too clever for his own good.
2. Also from the BBC:
The UK is having the warmest New Year's Day on record, with new high temperatures set for the second day in a row, the Met Office says. St James's Park in central London saw temperatures of 16.3C (61.3F) on Saturday as 2022 was ushered in...
The previous New Year's Day record was set in [drumroll please...] 1916, when it reached 15.6C (60.1F) in Bude, Cornwall.
It would appear that average temperatures are going up slightly in many places, but the constant cherry picking is like the boy crying wolf, I believe it less all the time. 0.7 degrees per century doesn't strike me as too catastrophic. It would be just as easy to cherry-pick the other way and list all the places where New Year's Day was colder in 2022 than it was in some other random year like 1916.
Similarly, there have been a lot of forest and brush fires in recent years. If somewhere has a particularly big or damaging fire, then they are quick to shout about it as if it had never happened before.
But what about all the places which have had large fires in the past which didn't have any fires at all in recent years? Do they mention those? Nope. That's just what forests do - they burn down every few decades and then grow back - or else there wouldn't be any forests left. If we stopped chopping them down, there would be as many trees as there ever were.
Monday, 3 January 2022
Science news.
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7 comments:
And if he must put it that way it would be better to say it scales with the square of the radius of the mirror and remind people of the equation they learned in school.
AKH, I actually liked that bit. The square of the radius increases at the same rate as the square of the diameter. It took me a second to think about that and then realise he was talking about the area.
I read somewhere that all these large forest fires are man-made. What would happen naturally is that there would be regular, small forest fires that burnt all the dead wood lying around that is easily combustible, but landowners don't like forest fires, so the small fires tend to get put out when they occur, meaning that the combustible material builds up until, when it does catch fire, the fire is too big to contain.
B, there is an element of that, but there were Aussie fire fighters who came up with counter examples. For example, many fires happened in 'natural' forests where there isn't any particular landowner. And then the Aborigines and their 'soft burn' got dragged into it.
Not the point really. I'd assume if there was a really bad fire somewhere, there won't be another one there for a couple of decades while it grows back.
Mark, I was thinking more USA.
Just yesterday,a weather presenter on the local news here (New Zealand) stated as fact that climate change was driving up temperatures and the sea level rising without any qualification or comparison with previous years or times.This is just following a week when in the middle of the antipodean summer it has been cold enough to put on the heating. I hate their dishonesty.
B, OK, I was thinking of Australia, where the fires were much worse.
JD, ah, but mere mortals like you and me only notice 'weather'. Only the all-seeing, all-knowing Alarmists know about 'climate'.
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